It’s the year 2000: Have the Soviets Beaten Us in Machine Tools Yet?
For a while, I’ve been thinking about the doomsday predictions that India and China are producing, roughly 15 times the number of graduate engineers that we are. (That’s our 60,000 to their 350,000 and 600,000, respectively.) And some perspective came in an old stack of books.
This handsome devil to my left is a German agro-economist by the name of Fritz Baade. Died in 1974. Granted, that name has some serious star quality to it, but I’m willing to bet you haven’t necessarily heard of him. Until yesterday, I hadn’t either, but he’s got me thinking.
I was helping my friend and colleague, the eminent futurist Joe Coates, move some books in his annex here in Washington this weekend. As Joe has been a futurist for more than 40 year, his library has got some great books from prognosticators past. One of them that jumped out was a 1971 title called The Race to the Year 2000. Its principal question was, who will control the world of the future? The West (us) or the East (Russia, China, North Korea, et al)? Since we already know the answer, I was fascinated to see his reasoning. 
Fritz was pretty pessimistic, actually, because you see the Soviets were outproducing us in terms of sheer number of engineers and machine tools. Thus, reasoned this venerable economist, given the fact that the sheer material force favored Soviet Communism, they were probably going to win unless we fixed that imbalance.
A few thoughts:
- What a great exercise in looking at assumptions that we can get caught in. Fritz assumed a) that there would be a Soviet Union and b) that machine tools would be the hot ticket. What about semiconductors and e-innovation, baby?
- Pretty obviously, there are significant cultural factors that make for a positive outcome in history. Having engineers is good, but having a culture that supports innovation, prosperity, freedom, justice, etc. counts for a lot.
My point? China and India are growing, industrializing, vibrant nations, and there is little question that there will be competition, both economic, political, military, and so forth. And America will be a place that people come to start a business and run with the big dogs. I think that as long as we make sure we have the soft infrastructure for innovation — venture capital, government support, a spirit for free enterprise, and ready financing, America isn’t in dire trouble.
But let’s not get cocky. 600,000 is a lot of engineers.